It’s feeding time at the weird science zoo

Carbohydrates that work without being ingested. Inheriting a tendency to …

Carbohydrates help athletic performance, even when you don't ingest them: Put a bunch of cyclists in a time trial, and you'd expect giving them a supply of carbohydrates would increase their performance. What you wouldn't necessarily expect is that the performance would still go up if they didn't ingest anything. It turns out that simply rinsing the mouth with carbohydrate solutions—even when the carbohydrate involved was tasteless—increased performance in ways that artificial sweeteners can't. The researchers verified a difference in response to the three classes of chemicals using functional MRI.

Knowledge is not power: Anyone who has spent some time in the US in recent years has undoubtedly lived through one of the episodes where a commonly used food product—most recently it was peanuts—gets contaminated by some sort of nasty bacterial pathogen. Researchers at Rutgers University have now done a survey to find out how consumers actually respond to the warnings issued by government agencies, such as the FDA. To an extent, the response is a mix of confusion and indifference. My favorite part of the report is the flow chart on page six, where you can follow the flow of questions past the oblivious and cautious to get to those 169 individuals who actually knew the precise type of tomatoes involved in a recent health scare and ate them anyway.

The "ooh, shiny!" attitude is hereditary: At least among the largemouth bass, that is, where the degree to which one is attracted to shiny bits of metal with hooks on the end can be a matter of life or death. The study that sorted this out has been running for 20 years, using an experimental catch-and-release lake that's sporadically drained, with its fish population surveyed. Researchers identified fish that had never been captured and tracked their offspring, along with those that had been caught and released. Apparently, both tendencies are heritable. Even though the lake is catch-and-release, the authors suggest that the selection comes from having adults pulled away from the eggs and offspring they normally protect, allowing predators to get at them.

Faking out a carnivore's sweet tooth: The research group that found out why cats are indifferent to sugar (they've got a mutation in one of the taste receptors) has extended their research by trying to sort out which carnivores have a sweet tooth. The researchers exposed a panel of six species to a different natural sugars and artificial sweeteners. No surprise that the lion was indifferent to them all, but there was an unexpected result: the red panda turned out to be the first mammal outside of the primates to actually sense aspartame. In fact, it seemed to enjoy half of the artificial sweeteners developed for human use, suggesting that it has a similar taste receptor.

Nocturnal animals use their DNA as a lens: Finally moving away from food, we get to a story that isn't especially weird so much as seriously cool. Most eukaryotic cells organize the DNA within their nucleus in a stereotypical manner: the inactive, condensed DNA occurs along the periphery of the nucleus, while the areas that are being actively made into RNA copies are typically in the middle. That same configuration occurs in the rods of most mammals, which are used for seeing in low-light conditions.

But, as the rods of nocturnal mammals begin to mature, a striking thing happens: that pattern is completely reversed, as the inactive DNA gets shuffled into the center of the nucleus, while the biologically active material gets spread around the periphery. Computer simulations show that this reversal has a remarkable impact on how light moves through the rods, as it converts the nucleus into a converging lens, improving the sensitivity of the rod. Cell, where the paper is published, made it a featured article, so you don't need a subscription if you want to read it.

Scientific citations track downloads: The Journal of Vision apparently tracks downloads of its articles, and its editor decided to figure out whether the frequency of downloads has any relationship with the prominence of the paper. Using citations as a measure of prominence, the answer is yes: there was a correlation between the two of 0.74, with citations tracking downloads after a lag of about two years. Money quote: "While we cannot equate download of an article with actually reading it, these are nonetheless remarkable numbers."

Yes, inbreeding really is bad for you: An open access study tracks the Spanish Habsburg dynasty, which has become infamous for marriages within the lineage, by looking at the degree of inbreeding in over 3,000 individuals. The authors calculate that the founder of the lineage, Philip I, was already somewhat unusual, but the coefficient of inbreeding rose ten-fold over the 200 years the family was in power, leaving the last of the lineage physically and mentally disabled, possibly as a result of two separate recessive genetic diseases.

Picking a mate by checking its hormones: Sexual selection was recognized back in Darwin's day as a way that random preferences for the appearance of mates could produce ostentatious displays like the peacock's tail. To an extent, the ability to develop ostentatious coloration and avoid being eaten by predators suggests a robust and healthy mate, but a new paper suggests that, in at least one species of seabird, the male's plumed crest tells the female something quite specific. It turns out the development of the crest is tied to corticosterone, a hormone that registers the male's social status and dietary state. So, in this case, a big crest directly indicates a happy and healthy mate.